Internal playtesting underway! A total of two and a half hours or so of background generation (and plenty of collaborative discussions) yielded four very different* investigators, ready to take on the mystery of a disappearing informant, somewhere down in Luna City’s bowels.

The locals seem suspicious of outsiders and not very impressed with the investigators’ hastily constructed cover story of being a press team from a lifestyle magazine… But something is clearly weird down here in Corridor 17; no signs of the informant yet but the group has stumbled on an unrelated crime scene where two people have been killed in an extremely violent fashion. And didn’t the last report from the informant include something about mysterious deaths? Who’s killing the locals?

In other words: it’s a completely normal weekday in Luna City!

(* OK, so thanks to some… interesting die rolls the characters may be different, but they all share a few quirks – so three out of four at some point woke up with a four year memory gap and some weird nightmares? Might be time to tweak those background event tables a little…)

Update!

So here’s what’s new:

• The website redesign is online! There’s a landing page, an FAQ and a devlog (which is basically just the same as the updates I make here). Check out https://lunacityblues.com/ if you’re curious!
• The intro adventure is, tentatively, “done” pending additional playtesting. This means (the first complete draft of) the main rulebook’s text is completely done! yay!
• A second playtest adventure will be ready within a week or two, and playtested internally.
• The layout process has begun – right now it’s mostly experimental, trying to get the basic shapes and flow right. I have a bunch of ideas, but we’ll see how well they translate to the actual page =)
• I’m in talks with another illustrator, and some pieces are in the works. I think you’ll like them. We’ll see.
• I’m putting together a “playtest package” with an adventure and either pregen characters or a compact-form chargen. The first external playtesters will be sourced locally through personal contacts or forums I frequent. I’ll let you know when I’m accepting applications from external playtesters!
• I might make that playtest package available to people who want to try running something at a con. I haven’t decided yet.
• I’ll also start recruiting proofreaders soon. Again, the first batch will be sourced locally and when I’m ready for “outsiders” I’ll let you know.

(As usual, everything is subject to change)

I’ve been teasing this a little bit… The fact that I love @bergtings art in Mutant Chronicles 1st edition is no secret, so when he said he’d be interested in making art for Luna City Blues I was extatic! This is a sketch for the book’s cover – subject to change etc etc of course. Absolutely fantastic; I’m really looking forward to seeing the final piece!

Time for an update!

(Give me a like if you get the reference )

– First draft of the book is so close to being done I can taste it. I’m in the final stretch of the final chapter, and I don’t think I’ll need more than a few pages to cover what I want to say. This means soon there’s a complete draft to show people, and when the Kickstarter gets off the ground I’ll be able to say “there’ll probably be delays, there often are, but at least the text is already done!”

It feels pretty great. We’ll see how much of it survives the process of revisions etc, but at least it’ll be *something*

– I’ve said this in a couple of different contexts by now but I think it bears repeating: There will be no AI-generated content in this project. I don’t personally consider generative AI to be an ethical technology and I don’t like what it’s doing to the ability of people to work as artists and illustrators. I won’t get too much up on my soapbox here, but suffice it to say there’ll be a zero tolerance policy for AI slop in official Luna City Blues products. I’d rather publish the book completely without illustrations than use something made by AI.

– Still no dev blog or much of a presence on other platforms, sorry. Been a bit swamped with other stuff. But I’m still planning on it.

Hello there! Hope you’ve survived summer. Or if it’s not summer where you are, I hope you’ve survived whatever you’ve had 

Some updates:

– Cults and Apostles done, as are most of the Mechanics chapter including character generation. It just needs some more examples, and I’m reworking the mechanics for trade/money/resources/equipment.

– Otherwise, the first main draft of the book only lacks the chapter on scenario design. Since that sort of thing is pretty much my jam, I don’t foresee mjuch problems. I’ve written chapters on how to design mystery-solving type scenarios into several of my previous games, and this will be pretty similar.

– I’m thinking about how to ramp up the PR bit. I mean, I’m a writer, doing PR isn’t really my strong suit and I have limited time and energy for these things but… I’m currently thinking about creating some sort of dev blog, probably at the official site. In the future, I’d write my updates there, then make sure to cross-post to Facebook, Instagram, maybe even the dreaded X. And also probably posting it to a mailing list of some kind.

The idea would be to try and get a bit of wider reach for these things. Without it leading to me getting swamped by PR stuff 

Alright, time for a small update again: Right now I’m finishing up the last of the Cults chapter, looking forward to writing some Apostles the next few days. I’m hoping to get most if not all of this first draft done over the next 3-4 weeks or so. Still on schedule! And when the draft is done, I’ll be able to start pulling all the other stuff together, like illustrations etc.

Meanwhile, I’ve started on this beauty. The novels really are something! Their strong pulpy feel might not be very well-suited for Luna City Blues, but I still enjoy them for what they are. And it’s also kind of interesting since they seem to work with a slightly different version of the 1/2e canon… I mean, the first book had the internet! Pretty sure “hacking” wasn’t a thing back in the day. This second book also talks pretty openly about the impressiveness of the terraforming of Venus, while the original RPG was pretty careful not to go into much detail. The jungles were just kind of *there*. I know 3e went into more detail, but still – I enjoy seeing different variations on the MC canon 

I remember when the Golgotha comic ran in Magnum, the legendary Swedish anthology magazine. Magnum also introduced me to translated versions of various 2000AD classics like Judge Dredd, Warlock and ABC Robots. And now I’ve added this beautiful collected edition to my Chronicles collection (and pile of research material for the game). I like how Bisley’s art lands somewhere between the clean-cut muscular heroics of Bonner and the gritty, atmospheric Bergting images.

Writing progresses nicely; most of the world-description is done. I’m hoping to have a complete first draft by the end of summer, but we’ll see. This week, I’ve mostly been writing about cults – their structure, how they protect themselves, etc. I’m really looking forward to writing the next chapter – the Apostles!

So as a Chronicles fan and a lifelong scifi reader, I can’t help but be interested in theories and news around “planet X”. When I grew up, it was number 10, but then Pluto got demoted…

I’m absolutely fascinated with the idea that it’s easier to detect planets in far-off-solar systems than in our own. There’s a lot we don’t know about our own back yard!

And a lot of the theories activate the MC part of my brain. Like this one here: https://www.caltech.edu/…/caltech-researchers-find… A planet 10 times the size of Earth, orbiting the earth at a pace of one revolution per 10-20 000 years. Monstrously huge, veiled in darkness due to its enormous distance to the sun. Maybe there are ruins there, maybe a large metal tablet…

Another hypothesis is that it’s actually a black hole… (https://www.astronomy.com/…/planet-nine-may-be-a-black…/) Which would, of course, alwo be kind of awesome. Maybe it’s both? An enormous Dyson sphere-like mega structure built around a black hole, somehow acting as both power source and a conduit between here and Unspace, or Beyond, or wherever the Legion’s been banished to…

(None of this is in any way official canon for Luna City Blues by the way, I just like to think about these things)

About 1/3 of the book’s chapters now have first drafts. All the Luna City, Megacorp and Brotherhood stuff has been written, next up is a chapter on secrets and then on to cults and the Legion. Looking forward to it!

My process in writing RPGs is pretty iterative – I start by writing a big outline, a hierarchal bullet point list where pretty much every “fact”, every thing I want to say in each chapter and under each heading, has its own bullet point. Then, I go through the outline and do a first draft of each chapter. (Playtesting takes place before & during this process.) When the first-drafts are all done, I go over them once myself to see if I can catch some language errors or other problems. After that, I usually try to find a small group of volunteer proofreaders.

So… yeah. Currently just working through the first-draft phase, while simultaneously reading some more MC and trying to find time for playtesting. So far this has been kind of difficult – I’m working full-time as a teacher, and right now is pretty much the busiest time of year for us. Grading and whatnot. So… I hope to get some more playtesting done once things calm down a bit